With the continued evolution of semiconductor technologies, semiconductor chips/dies are becoming increasingly smaller. In the meantime, more functions are being integrated into the semiconductor dies. Accordingly, the semiconductor dies have increasingly greater numbers of input/output (I/O) pads packed into smaller areas. As a result, the packaging of the semiconductor dies becomes more difficult, which adversely affects the yield of the packaging.
Conventional package technologies can be divided into two categories. In the first category, dies on a wafer are packaged before they are sawed. This packaging technology has some advantageous features, such as a greater throughput and a lower cost. Further, less underfill or molding compound is needed. However, this packaging technology also suffers from drawbacks. As aforementioned, the sizes of the dies are becoming smaller, and the respective packages can only be fan-in type packages, in which the I/O pads of each die are limited to a region directly over the surface of the respective die. With the limited areas of the dies, the number of the I/O pads is limited due to the limitation of the pitch of the I/O pads. If the pitch of the pads is decreased, solder bridging may occur. Additionally, under the fixed ball-size requirement, solder balls must have a predetermined size, which in turn limits the number of solder balls that can be packed on the surface of a die.
In the other category of packaging, dies are sawed from wafers before they are packaged, and only “known-good-dies” are packaged. An advantageous feature of this packaging technology is the possibility of forming fan-out packages, which means that the I/O pads on a die can be redistributed to a greater area than that of the die, and hence the number of I/O pads packed on the surfaces of the dies can be increased.